God Helps Those Who Cannot Help Themselves

Last week, just after posting a blog about how the Christian expectation of civil authority is to care for the poor and oppressed, I got into a bit of a debate with a friend about the role of civil authority. At one point, he argued that my position failed because I was focusing too much on what society should do for the poor, instead of expecting people to take more personal responsibility. I retorted that I get my morality from the Bible, and he argued that the morality in the Bible has social boundaries that are culturally and nationally defined. The care for the orphan and widow was based upon the assumption that the orphan and widow were fellow God-worshiping Israelites.  Many Christians think this way, arguing that the poor need to help themselves and shouldn’t be looking for handouts. A common expression goes, “God helps those who help themselves.” This discourse has existed since long before I was born and will continue long after I am gone, but as the war of words rage within the Church, looking at the values expressed in another psalm certainly couldn’t hurt.

While last week our psalm talked about the godly behavior of a good king, Psalm 146 talks about the good behavior of God. Once again, the psalmist plays the hits. God grants justice to the oppressed, feeds the hungry, and sustains the orphan and widow. With these examples, we can see God’s dedication to helping those most in need. God doesn’t watch the oppressed free themselves; God grants them justice. God doesn’t encourage the hungry to work harder for their food; God feeds the hungry. God doesn’t tell the orphan and widow to make themselves useful and stop looking for handouts; God sustains them. One could argue that God takes care of these people by motivating them to do the work themselves, but that isn’t clear in Scripture. Usually, when God feeds the hungry, God is feeding the helpless hungry with a miracle. God directed ravens to feed Elijah (1 Kings 17), God rewards a widow for her trust and hospitality by giving her an endless supply of flour and oil (1 Kings 17), and in all four Gospels, Jesus miraculously multiplies a small meal to feed over 5,000 people. God specifically demonstrates God’s power by sustaining those who could not sustain themselves. But this isn’t simply a matter of God wanting to show off for the world. God helps the helpless because God cares about all people, and if all people are going to be cared for, help must be given first to those who cannot help themselves. 

In addition to the classics, Psalm 146 includes a few examples that deserve some extra attention: God frees the captive, lifts the bowed down, and cares for the stranger. The word for captive can also be translated as “prisoner.” It’s a rendering of a Hebrew word that is associated with the verb “to bind.” Of course, there is a tendency among law-abiding Christians to qualify this notion. We want God to free the unjustly bound. This may be the case with this verse, but that interpretation isn’t necessary. God often works through broken people, hopelessly sinful people. God redeems them and gives them a second chance. As much as we may fear the idea of prisoners being released onto the streets, God frees the prisoner. God redeems the lost, wayward, sinful soul and makes them righteous. To be clear, this isn’t something we can do. We can’t will a violent criminal to simply become a good person, but God can. Faith requires that we trust God to redeem and set the captive free.

There are five occurrences in the Hebrew Bible of the word translated “bowed down” in this psalm, and one of them is used in almost the exact same way. Another one is in Psalm 57 and seems to indicate a deep depression of the soul, a despair in the face of enemies. Maybe lifting up the bowed down means lifting people out of their dark nights—those hopeless, lonely passages of life—but there may be another explanation. The other two uses are in Isaiah 58 and Micah 6, both passages that talk about a misunderstanding of what God wants from us. People bow down before God in worship and reverence, with sacrifice and sackcloth, but God isn’t actually interested in this worship. God wants people to do justice, care for the hungry and oppressed, and walk in humility. Maybe God lifting those who are bowed down means exactly how Luther understood the purpose of justification. We don’t need to come before God in sackcloth and ashes to be worthy of God. God has saved us by grace, now our duty is to care for our neighbor, especially the neighbor who is in need of liberation.

Finally, God “cares for the stranger.” One could argue that the expectation of the stranger was that they would adopt the customs of the Israelites and worship their God as they do. If they weren’t willing to do this, they shouldn’t receive care. However, this doesn’t really fit with how the word is often used in the Hebrew Bible. The Hebrew Bible does place certain expectations on strangers living within Israel in certain passages. However, the term “stranger” is often applied to the people of Israel themselves. They were strangers in the land of Egypt. While they were there, they didn’t take on the culture and gods of the Egyptians. They were expected to remain true to the LORD. The concept of a stranger is one who doesn't really fit into the broader culture. They are outsiders by nature. Nonetheless, God cares for them. The widow mentioned above, who received an unlimited supply of ingredients to make bread in a drought, wasn’t an Israelite. She was from a small town that belonged to Sidon, a Phonecian city. Jesus specifically mentions her in Luke 4 as an example of God going to outsiders before Israel. The other example he mentions is Naaman, the Syrian general and leper who was healed by Elijah in 2 Kings 5. In this story, he clearly isn’t a worshiper of the LORD before the miraculous healing. He makes a confession of faith afterwards. God helps the non-believing outsider before a confession of faith is made. God’s commitment to care for the stranger is so strong that not even unbelief or poor moral character can stop God’s mission (Matthew 5:45).

Given what the Bible says about God’s care for the oppressed, the poor, the stranger, and the helpless, I struggle to see how the aforementioned discourse has lasted so long. Why do we say things like “God helps those who help themselves,” when that is so clearly not the case with the God of Scripture? In fact, that undermines the very nature of the Gospel. As Luther said, “We are all beggars.” With regard to salvation, none of us are so righteous that we could earn our way into paradise. We are all sinners, desperate for God’s salvation, helpless, hopeless, and lost. God helps us precisely because God loves us and we cannot save ourselves. Unfortunately, the sin of idolatry goes deep. It isn’t just money and power that we idolize. Sometimes, the very thing we call God is a human-constructed idol and we struggle to tell the difference. To be clear, the god who only helps those who help themselves is not the God of salvation, not the God of Scripture, not the God revealed in the person of Jesus Christ. The god who tells the poor to just work harder and ignores the helpless, who does nothing to set the captive free, who accepts false worship without driving people to do justice, and who ignores the plight of the stranger, is an idol, not worthy of worship or praise—a vain and empty thing without life or power. This god is a reflection of our own desire for power and fear of death. The only God worthy of praise is the God who cares for the stranger, lifts up those who are bowed down, liberates the prisoner, and goes to the cross for the salvation of all.